New World Notes

SL Flickr Pick: Gorgeously Ambiguous Female Avatar Photos by Bee

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Bee’s D.U.S.H.A. caught my eye with its brilliant chiaroscuro effect. It has the tone of light and shadow from the old Dutch masters, but really what it reminded me was an old SCTV sendup of Ingmar Bergman. If you watch it, you will understand. It must be the heat making me lightheaded. If you get a kick out Ingmar Bergman satires there is none better than De Dűva.I must confess my friends and I took to saying “H2Oska” for water for far too long.

More of her striking use of lighting that seems to add subtext to her photos.

What It Would Take to Truly Upgrade Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Fascinating conversation in response to Luther Weymann's somber analysis of Second Life's prospects under new ownership, featuring many comments by readers who seem to be longtime veterans of the game/tech industry, or at least write with that level of expertise.

Among them is  Russell Skyther, who wrote this really sharp breakdown of what it would take to upgrade Second Life. It's partly a response to an earlier comment arguing that "Updating SL isn't really all that hard cause they have done it is how we got mesh and rigged mesh and now animesh. They can continue to keep layering new content and it'll work just fine."

Skyther argues otherwise:

The issue isn't that you can't update Second Life's code. or even rewrite it from scratch. BOTH have been done, see: OpenSimulator, an Open-Source clone of SL functionality that's close enough [that] most 3rd party clients support it out of the box.

But ability isn't the same thing as willingness. And far from being 'not all that hard' as the above comment states, each one of the examples features: Mesh, Rigged, animesh, and now Bakes on Mesh are all hacks onto an engine that wasn't designed for it. Now you can do that, and they did. But that incurs a serious performance penalty unless you redo the entire graphics pipeline (which they didn't). That's what this guy's talking about. It's not that you can't update or rewrite SL, it's that it's not cost effective to do so on a level that would give you acceptable performance.

To better explain SL's codebase issues. This is what I would consider a minimum for a true SL-like game in 2020 (VR Chat isn't really SL-like, but more of a Sansar that worked):

Top 5 Posts Last Week, Including a Second Life for IMVU

• Watch Here: STÖMOL, The First Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller Shot Entirely In Second Life!
• How IMVU Became A Massive Mobile Metaverse When No One Was Looking
• Second Life Screenshots Made Into Breathtaking, Ansel Adams-Like Imagery
• Second Life Community Quickly Raises & Donates Over $11,000 For Black Lives Matter & Other Justice Orgs
• SL Enthusiast & Veteran Tech Exec Predicts Dark Future For Virtual World

Watch Here: STÖMOL, The First Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller Shot Entirely in Second Life!

Update: Bumped up for weekend viewing!

As promised, New World Notes is very proud to debut the feature-length machinima by Huckleberry Hax. Put your headphones on, dim the lights, and press play. And join me below for director's comments (with potential spoilers) and running comments from the audience in the aisle!

Tomorrow in Sinespace: Miro Shot Presents a Virtual Interactive Radio Show with DJ Tobi Lynn, Powered by Dash Radio

UPDATE: Show embedded below!

A Second Life Fashion Blog That's Also an Avatar Roleplay Diary

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Everlina Kindred has a different approach to blogging. She creates her pictures and provides what details she chooses to highlight on Flickr and uses her pictures to illustrate her diary which she posts to about twice a month. This pictures of for Entry #68 and in-character diary of her role play. This comes complete with a tarot reading 

• Hair by Doux (Dam1710)
• Palazzo Jumpsuit by Sallie (Sallie Takao)

An earlier diary describing school activities next.

How IMVU Became a Massive Mobile Metaverse When No One Was Looking

In a recent chat with New World Notes readers about the future of Second Life, many wondered whatever became of IMVU, the 3D chat-based world that once was seen by some as rival to SL itself -- and by others as a low-end version of the metaverse.

Let me tell you what's happened with IMVU over the last few years and since you last likely thought about it, if ever at all.

IMVU has become massive in just about every sense:

It has 7 million monthly active users.

And 1.2 million daily active users.

And a peak daily concurrency of 140,000 users.

And peak average daily concurrency of 120,000 users.

These numbers, as any regular reader will tell you, far outstrip any peak metric Second Life has ever achieved, in recent times with about 600,000 to 900,000 monthly users (depending how you define a "user"), and a peak concurrency that's never exceeded the mid-five figures.

It's also massive in terms of company revenue: According to App Annie, it's a top grossing app right behind the white hot video sharing app TikTok (see attached pic below).

It's also massive in terms of a virtual marketplace, with 50 million items in the catalog, made by 50,000 active creators.

Yes, IMVU added Adult-rated content in 2014 -- but no, that's not why it's grown so large:

Listen: High Fidelity Adds New Demo With Ambient Effects to Its 3D Audio-Based Virtual World -- And a Wedding Venue for Virtual Marriages!

Click "JOIN LIVE DEMO" here to try a new demo of High Fidelity, the 3D audio-based virtual world from Philip Rosedale and crew. (Headphones and mic strongly recommended!) As you'll hear, the demo immersively dives you into a pool party where you seem to be surrounded by music and dozens of people, talking (or sometimes ranting!) all around you. At least 65 of them are audio-based bots -- a new feature added to the platform.

"I think there are 65 bots there... and two DJ sources in that map," Philip tells me. These ambient effects join a new set of updates announced recently on the HiFI blog:

Second Life Screenshots Made Into Breathtaking, Ansel Adams-Like Imagery

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Kato Salyut is limiting his work to black and white, as he explained in his “About” page: 

“As part of my effort to protest the current political climate in DC I am limiting my colors to mono and duo-tone images. Occasionally a glimpse of color can be seen when there is a crack in the power structure. Always looking for that crack and hoping it grows letting in even more color. I love color, rich greens, reds, gold and blue. I am always tempted to post in color. Unfortunately the air in DC is so putrid, the decisions against humanity and the environment are unforgivable.”

In his skilled hands, black and white is not limiting though. This “Landscape” is rich in detail and reminiscent of the great Ansel Adams whose best work was in black and white. I love the detail in this picture, how the rock face is not just a plane of gray, but this mottled mix of colors, the roughness of the rock and the lichen are captured in high relief. 

Kato Salyut has a surreal side to his work in his next photo.

Play in Luxembourg: Authentic 19th Century City Simulation Which Started in SL & Sansar But Moved to ROBLOX

1867 Historical Role Play is a simulation game in ROBLOX with a fascinating virtual world history. It began as a Second Life-based project sponsored by a real life museum, and then expanded to Sansar... but then hit some cost and platform barriers. As Hauptmann "Cyberpiper" Weyder explained to me last year:

[T]he problem lies in the rather volatile nature of the SL community. You do something new, nice, interesting, and folks will come. In order to keep it up though you have to put in a bug work load, mainly organizing one event after another. But despite our best efforts, traffic waned. Gosh we offered free housing to our 1867 community!! Rare in SL! The contract with the [RL] museum came to an end, and frankly we could not afford to pay 7000.-€ tier to Linden Lab a year out of our own pocket!

Sansar has been a disappointment. We managed to do a whole street eventually, but had to start over because of too much lag, trying to figure out ways of more efficient texturing or building. Also Sansar had promised mobile development, which was then taken off the roadmap, a big disappointment for us.  

Cyberpiper just let me know that he and his team have greatly expanded the simulation in ROBLOX, to the point where it's as geographically large as the original SL sim: